From the University of Buffalo

Historic Bentley Snow Crystal Collection Available Again

Thanks to a Digital Library Produced by UB Students the Historic Bentley Snow Crystal Collection will be available again.
Bentley was America's first cloud physicist. He made 10,000 glass photomicrographic plates between 1880 and 1926, upon which he captured the images of 5,000 individual snow crystals and 5,000 images of dew and frost. This collection has been held since the 1930s by the Buffalo Museum of Science, although its fragility has prevented its widespread use by researchers or the public.


P1a Snowflake: Hexagonal plate Great blizzard snow crystals
 

Over the years, the glass plates deteriorated, however, and the work of Wilson Alwyn Bentley might have been lost forever to researchers and the public, had not a group of graduate students from the University at Buffalo stepped in to save it for posterity.

Bentley's images now are available to the public, thanks to graduate students in the UB School of Informatics, who have developed a fully operational digital library for the Wilson A. Bentley Snow Crystal Collection.
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